Bookstruck: (Do You Wanna Hear a Story?)
by Constellations of Neverland
Summary: "He could go anywhere he wanted to go; he could do anything that he wanted to do―" And for a child who couldn't, it only made her think of walls with no windows and bedrooms with closed doors, parental guidance that advised her to, "never go anywhere until you've learned how to suffocate underneath the weight of your own gloves." Frozen/Tangled AU Drabbles (Full Summary Inside)
1. (I) The Story

**_Synopsis_**

A storybook-obsessed orphan thinks he's found a real life "girl wizard" behind the closed gates of Arendelle. Even though her innocence is stifled, her existing is what keeps his anchored. "You used to be my confidant. Now you're her husband."

* * *

༺.❆.༻

* * *

_"And this is where we bury our hearts,_

_between self-defeating personality disorders_

_and burnt bridges and midnight ramblings_

_embedding our memories in forsaken homes_

_like it is a conscious decision to shed_

_our wings (reptiles don't fly)"_

~*"Defeathered," **by intricately-ordinary**

* * *

. ❄ _(i was the yesterday dreading my tomorrow; you were the tomorrow running from your today...)_

_❄._

❄ .

❄ .

_. ❄_

❄ .

_"You're hiding in the library again too, huh?" _He'd pat her head like a kitten's, with the flat base of his palm, doing what he did to all children without childhoods._ "Don't cry,"―_pat, pat―"_do you wanna hear a story?"_

The stories in question were redundant.

Swashbucklers.

Adventurers.

Nobles.

Rogues.

Figureheads of freedom.

Men made out of stardust.

_"He could go anywhere he wanted to go; he could do anything that he wanted to do―"_

―And for an eight year old who couldn't, it only made her think of walls with no windows and bedrooms with closed doors, parental guidance that advised her to, "_never go anywhere until you've learned how to suffocate."_

Yet_ Flynnigan Rider_ could go anywhere he wanted to go; he could do anything that he wanted to do. No right ― no wrong ― _no rules for him; _he was free_. _Her heart was a bird and her ribs were a cage, but the man with the smolder was born a phoenix. She projected her limitations onto the rogue made of ink, picturing how it would be to live inside paragraphs of unpunctuated freedom; to be independent; to live unshackled and self-governed; to see "what a party looks like" for kids her age; to be―

_"Just like him,"_ the servant boy bragged, strung to his top note. _"Someday, I'll be just like him ― straight out of all the fairytales. I'll have my own castle, with my own future, and live far, far away ― as close to the sun as possible! I'll rise like the break of dawn and catapult off cloud nine."_

The girl paused, feeling her heart muscles twist like a key turning in a lock.

_"The past will be in the past, and I'm never going back; I don't care what they're going to say. I'll test the limits and break through."_

She wiped her tears off the illustration in his book, aware that she could never plagiarize his lyrics. He, like the figureheads of freedom, possessed that peculiar, hormone-raging lust for escape, the confidence to shed his sheepskin and _make life happen_. But every wild boy had a shackled foot and a broken childhood that held them down. She saw the fragments when he looked away, smiling at the window like an earthbound god no one ever tried to name a star after.

_"I want to hear the story behind your eyes..."_

He looked straight at her. Closing in. Closing up. Like an oyster with a pearl broken in two parts. _"I don't have a story."_

She frowned. Making her hands into small fists on her knees. Something had clouded the constellations in his eyes; something she did not catch, but felt. Something stowed and hidden. A mysterious layer guarding the past.

(_you wanted valuable treasure because you were nobody's treasure)_

The indentured servant's body language grew timid and awkward; goosebumps breaking across his arms, knees knocking with the same _please-don't-look-too-close_ that lurked between all twenty-four teeth in her smiles. Part of her wanted to laugh at the scenario _― _a throaty, strained laugh with disbelief and understanding coughed up together. They were _pauper _and_ princess_, but they stifled self-consciousness equally. Masked weak self-esteems. Could not tolerate any sunlight hitting the darkest, deepest parts of their empty shelves.

All she had was a three-line script to perform a role her parents wrote for her; all he had were fantasy books to rewrite stories that had no happy endings.

_(our inklines were smudged but we tried our best to not seep through the paper)_

_"Do you want to see Orion's Belt?"_ The boy looked at her upside down, never rightside up, just as he did all the world_. "If I took you to the stars, would you make me a castle?"_

She squeezed her knees, palmed her tears, and shook her head under the fingers that clutched it. _"You'd catch a cold..."_

He laughed. Loudly. Uncontrollably. Shakily. _"Then how about an ice sculpture of myself?"_

She smiled shyly. Being raised on adventure tales with mermaids and wizards made him believe she was Lady of the Lake herself. He forever held onto a giddy affection for the first ice castle he saw her make in the ballroom with her sister, a day the foreign orphan went poking his nose around the forbidden rooms of the royal dorms.

_(but you and i weren't meant to be in the same plot)_

_"OOH! Or you could make another ice castle in the ballrooms again; you know, like when Princess Anna_ _―"_

_"―Fitzherbert! Where'd you run off to, you no-good shoe-shiner?!"_

She jumped.

He dropped his book in horror.

Wait.

...No.

_No no no no no no_

_no no no no no no_

_no no no no no no_

_no no no no no no_

_no no no no no no―_

The sprigs of ice on the wall behind her sparkled like distorted, evil trees. The boy before her trembled like a ghost in a shell. Fear hijacked her body and she flew across the library, flailing and tripping behind shelves to melt between pages of parallel universes where melodramas like these ended with _happily ever after_ in big, cursive letters. Two hours of sobbing against cold walls and there were no _fairy godmothers_ to cry into. Guards were stampeding the halls, shouting left and right, and she was folded up on the floor at the back of the _Death &amp; Tragedy_ aisle.

_"H-Hey."_ Hushed, nervous laughter. _"Don't hide in the books; you'll get papercuts..."_

She could feel the nerves in the boy's hand as it trembled down on her head, pulsating with something greater than all the climaxes in his stories...

_"Don't!"_ Her wail was like a firecracker. _"Don't touch me!"_

His hand snapped back.

_"Pl-Please..."_ Sniffle. _"...I'm..."_ A curse.

_(and you didn't have enough ink to rewrite that...)_

His eyes were wide with fear. Pity. Empathy. The look of a boy who didn't know what was happening in his brain as he watched her hyperventilate. She turned her face into the carpet, shaking with more trauma than her little body could take.

_"...Don't cry..." _He patted her head like a kitten's, with the flat base of his palm, and dropped a playful, yet shaky whisper a little ways by her ear_―_"_Do you wanna hear a story about the Snow Q―"_

_"―No."_ She clenched her teeth, eyelashes beating out the tears as she tried to muster the strength to jerk away, but she couldn't keep herself from dissolving into soft wails. _"Just go away." _

_"You know..."_ He paused._ "...I don't...got that much in me to like,"―_he sounded afraid of his own voice, recognizing both the insanity and sadness in the situation_―"but I like you."_

An absurd plot twist.

_"...Why?" _An absurd moment of weakness and anger.

_"...Because you're like the wizards in all those stories―"_

_(i was a _**_plot hole _**_in my own story)_

_"―yet you don't like yourself that much, either." _Ended by an absurd, nervous laugh.

Tears dropped off her cheeks one by one as she stared at him, and despite all his goosebumps and shaking hands, he stared at her with a smile that seemed to hurt his mouth.

She sniveled, turned, and laughed with her face against her palms. Quietly. Uncontrollably. Shakily.

_(i was not a fairy-tale)_

❄.

_❄ ._

_. ❄ _  
❄ .

❄ _(but i was the book you didn't put down...)_

* * *

_I'll make two pairs of cardboard wings,_

_one for you and one for me,_

_so that one day when we get old we can fly to the sun_

_and make sky castles to live in forever..._

* * *

~*"Sky Castles," **by intricately-ordinary**

* * *

❆ **Author's Note**

* * *

This is a request. The Quivering Pens was not something I wanted to recommend to the young requester (if only for its ideologically sensitive content), so I detached (or decapitated) one of its predominant themes and gave it its own AU for her to enjoy. The setting was meant to be told like a memory being looked back on. After this one-shot, "Bookstruck" was asked to be serial. I never had that in mind, but it happened.

To clarify, even though I like it unlisted:

If you've read Frozen's supplementary books, you'll know that Elsa didn't stay in her room throughout her childhood in Frozen. The book "A Sister Like Me" (and Anna confirms it in Frozen as well) depicts Elsa walking around the castle and frequenting several areas like a normal person. She ignored Anna the entire time, who trailed behind her in an effort to get her attention before stopping altogether. In this one-shot, she was sulking in the back of her father's library. She's also eight and gloveless here; she hasn't reached the stage where her powers are overreactive.

Eugene works as the castle's "indentured" servant. It's the orphanage's way of giving illegitimate, low-born children a trade. His mother is from Arendelle and his father is from Corona. The interaction he has here with Elsa is similar to the dynamic she allowed between herself and her parents: emotionally distant, but physically accessible, due to them knowing about her powers (before she realizes she can hurt them by accident, too).


	2. (II) The Words

**A/N:** I think everyone in the Tangled fandom already knows this history about Eugene's name; if I were him, I'd hate my name, too!

* * *

_"Learn to love yourself." __**~birdsonqs**_

* * *

**༺****.✸****.****༻**

* * *

_"Illegitimate."_

According to the shouter, he had been umbilically attached to that word since birth_._

_"You're illegitimate."_

_"What?"_

_"Invalid."_

_"Ah."_

_"A freak accident."_

_"Well—"_

_"A waste of egg and sperm."_

_"And you don't belong."_

A circle of laughter filled the garden.

_"I'm sorry, gentlemen, but I believe you've mistaken me for someone else—"_

_"Don't you get tired of being called 'Fitzherbert' when you know the name is synonymous with "bastard" and "whoreson"?"_

The nine year old princess felt her own hair raising at the insults, but she was too clean behind the ears to understand the meaning of the words.

_"Don't you get sick of watching the kids with normal families play?"_

She passed this huddle of commotion every afternoon on her way to the library, stopping to witness the grandstand of classism being paraded by her own kin.

In the beginning, she didn't know why Eugene was avoided after the utterance of his full name. She'd concluded that his lack of friendships had something to do with being poor or orphaned — and perhaps the fact that his "apprenticeship" involved the most disagreeable duties in the servant halls, but the _poor_ and the _orphaned_ did not accept _Eugene Fitzherbert _either.

He was mutually sidestepped by the high-nosed Lady in Waiting — shunned by the ex-courtiers of her father's court — and likened to a "pitiful sob story" by the tutting maids, yet he was not handicapped or deformed to warrant such reactions. Being a misfit via social class was bound to attract judgment in the world, but there was nothing on his skin — nothing on his face — _nothing frosting his hands_ — to preface any external oddities. His aesthetic features and _normal_ genetic makeup should have given him the companionship of at least _one _coequal.

Instead, the hall boy read books alone, rubbing the very subjects he serviced the wrong way with theatrical one-liners.

_"Could you scrub the dirt off your own back as hard as you scrub the mud off our shoes?"_

The loaded bigotry in their sentences made her want to be running. Never should any kingdom comprise of the _high-born_ treating the underprivileged like _lesser than's _by shaming them for a birth they had no say in.

_(...because i would have been lower than anyone)_

_"What does it feel like to say, "Hi, I'm illegitimate," when people ask your name? When governors, traders, masters, and lords pull out your document?"_

His words became inaudible when they cornered him against the stone walls, but she could make out the results even from the hedges. The pauper lacked machimso — all signs of muscle meat, really — and defended his hind with a _brains-over-brawns_ attitude, which only infuriated the page boys he vied.

_"You've got some nerve getting slick with us all the time!"_

The lad was fast becoming a clown, and he most likely intended to blather negotiations like one, least of all until he managed to slip out of their hands like an eel — but this is not what happened.

_"Oy, you! You damn well know you're nothing but an orphan!"_

The outcry shocked her. The _Page of Honour_ had gotten a hold of the weasel, roughed him up, and asked his posse to search him for any belongings, stolen or otherwise. Once they found a storybook with what appeared to be his name scribbled on the back, they cheered, _"Eugene, the bastard of a scoundrel named Herbert!"_ like hecklers. They then proceeded to make fun of his backstory as the dirty little orphan boy,and flung his book — the first and only thing he owned — into the mud.

_"Hey!"_ His signature savviness, the one that made him seem carelessly untroubled by anything, was now destroyed. He didn't try to coo — _"Gentlemen, gentlemen!" — _as they closed in on him. Like a stray dog with his tail between his legs, he gawked at their towering shadows with fear.

_"It's a sorry backstory for a mouthy peasant like yourself; it tells you exactly where you come from: nothing."_

_(this is the certificated reminder that you are born_**_ inferior_**_)_

_"St_—_..." _Her voice would not come up or out, too parched from the guilt of making her own oversimplifications about his story.

_"Orphans do not have a normal upbringing,"_ Papa would say, having hoped to make her know something of the less fortunate. _"They do not have a "normal" household, a "normal" childhood, a "normal" family life, or even a normal stroll out into the city."_ They were sheltered — by all means like crammed hens shivering in a coop due to the traumatic separation from their families — and by having no biological parents to nurture them, they were thereby branded illegitimate persons by default.

She would later ask her father what it meant to be a _Fitz_, and he told her that modern communities stamped the prefix onto children born out of wedlock, specifically ones unacknowledged by their fathers in the gentry. If not mutilated at birth, such stigmatized infants were enrolled into orphanages with poverty and ostracism dictating their futures. Most astonishingly, the suffix which followed _"Fitz"_ was the assumed father's name, so for Eugene, that was, _"Herbert."_

Her father went on to contend that the presence of _"Fitz"_ made itself more than an abandoned name tag on an orphan's collar; in the **_God-fearing_** world, it was a birthmark of shame.

A product of sin.

A—

_"Bastard."_

The presence of_ "Fitz" _literally tagged him as,_ "Eugene, the bastard son of Herbert," _before all.

_(...and all you had was your name)_

She chewed on her braid.

— _"...Don't you have any friends?"_

— _"Nope."_

— _"Why not?"_

— _"Simple: they'd drag me down!"_

How many times a day did he lie to her back then?

_"Get your book, poor boy; it's getting dirty."_

With her geometry books hugged against her ribs, she tried to fathom how it would feel to be burdened by what — at first — appeared to be letters.

A name.

A social idea.

An extension and identification of who you were.

Constructs.

Labels.

**Words.**

Big yet small.

Petty yet persuasive.

Definitive yet evil.

_(ones your parents, destiny, and society chose for you...)_

What daughters of power they had to bring self-esteem to the ground.

_(your self-image to the ground...)_

The word, "poor."

The word, "orphan."

The word, "bastard."

The word, "illegitimate."

The word, "alone."

_(are not what make you)_

Yet she finally understood why there was no hiding from them under some flimsy fabric of defense.

His parents, people he'd never met, had not been available to grant protection or concern. They did not hand him a single tool, sword, or shield and say, _"just conceal it; just put on a show." _Buthe was doing it all by himself. Theatrical one-liners. Boastful quotes of another's glorified status. Of what he was not.

_"Someday, I'll be just like him ― straight out of all the fairytales. I'll have my own castle, with my own future, and live far, far away ― as close to the sun as possible!"_

_(and run away from a damaged, undesired child)_

His parents could not lock the gates and close the shutters to "help" him pretend that the discriminatory world wouldn't touch him _― _that the deprivation and deterioration of his environment did not turn his childhood into his prison. He had to grow up fast and become a man without any tutoring.

_(you_ _have been umbilically attached to destitution since birth)_

Yet still he said: _"I'll test the limits and break through."_

She looked at the boys coaxing him on to remember that he's _less than._

_"Aren't you mad that no one wants you here?"_

_"Aren't you mad that you'll never be good enough?"_

_"Aren't you mad that your parents never __came__ back?"_

_"Stop it!"_

The boys dispersed like vultures leaving a carcass.

She entered the garden with her hands folded in front of her, the perfect statue of queenliness and severity, but the baby fat around her cheeks was swollen with more annoyance than they could hold, making her appear childlike. The pages didn't stammer out their excuses upon her intervention; they straightened up and kept their heads bowed out of respect. Her lips squirmed as she stared at their scalps. Although she did not have the power of _the Crown_ to expel them, an injunction was issued: she would tell her father of their dishonorable conduct, and request that they scrub boots, empty chamber pots, urine pots, or any other number of pots _with_ the boy. Sweat rolled down their throats, and they looked from one face to another, before lowering their eyes to the ground.

Eugene, on the other hand, looked unharmed, but he still trembled from where he sat with his arms over his head, only peeking out from the crook of his elbow when he heard her boot crunch the grass. Channeling the statesmanship of her father, she ordered the pages to return the servant to his feet at once. He clambered up with the help of halfhearted arms, swaying off balance as he tried to wrap his head around the scene. The pages were dismissed, but the pauper didn't watch them leave. He studied the princess as though she were some eye test chart, his little heart palpitating with confusion, and perhaps a little terror also. Elsa watched the straight lines of his eyebrows draw forward, the clenching of his jaw, the vein beating in his neck.

His lips then moved to the shaky words: _"You saw."_

Her emotions were all flattened together in front of her face now, and her wide-set eyes―virtually half-shut―were topped with a confused frown.

_"That." _Pause. _"All that."_

She flinched. There was some kind of pain behind his response_, _some kind of utter stupidity_, _because he was implying that he was_ ashamed._ Not ashamed that his origins had been dragged through the mud, but ashamed that she'd seen and heard it.

_(the prologue to the downer sob-story)_

She bent down, touching the fallen book on the floor, and affectionately picked it up, extracting clumps of mud with her handkerchief. The inside of the smudged pages read:

* * *

**❍༻****༺(****)****༻****༺❍**

_THE TALES OF_

**/E/U/G/E/N/E/**

**/F/I/T/Z/H/E/R/B/E/R/T/**

_FLYNN RIDER  
_

**❍༻****༺(****)****༻****༺❍**

* * *

_(and it was then i wondered how much paper you wasted crossing out your name)_

Her thumb brushed over the paper's fold, fingering at the scraggly letters of his birth name. He could slather it with ten bottles of white-out if he wanted ― wash the dirt of poverty off his hands until it became runny black liquid ― but it would still drip behind him when he walked into the room. Into the world.

_(into the masquerade ball of adulthood)_

Maybe it was better to carve out one's own little place in some alternative universe after all. One where sob-stories end with _And I Lived Happily Happily Ever After._

_(...far, far away)_

She gazed at the frontcover of the man who'd been born a phoenix, and, with a little resignation, held the book out to the pauper without looking him in the eye.

He accepted it hesitantly, rocking on the balls of his feet, and thumbed away unshed tears. He tried to focus on reviving his saga by removing his focus from her—

_"'Herbert' means illustrious warrior."_

Eyes blinking, he stared back at her with the shocked, desperate stare of a person who wanted to hear something a second, third, and fourth time.

_"Papa_―_..."_ She paused. Stationing her voice. Looking down at her restless phalanges. _"Papa said 'Herbert' means illustrious warrior."_ Her words grew timider. Quieter. Going away. _"And Eugene_―"

_"And Eugene?"_

She gave him a pointed look, before recovering from his brazen earnestness._ "...And 'Eugene' means―...'noble.'"_

The tension in his forehead started to unwind. Sunlight danced in his eyes as he looked at his fingers, playing and twiddling with the thumbs, trying to twitch out the bashfulness hitching up the corner of his mouth. As he held his tongue to his tooth, he was only capable of a contemplative, _"'Noble,' eh...?"_

She trailed her wet eyes along the floor before darting them back to him.

There was the blossoming of a sad, lopsided smile on his face, but it was still a smile. The child lowered himself onto the grass with an exhausted little plop, letting a tired, _"Ah!"_ sigh out of him, and crossed his legs as he dried the bookcover with the end of his shirt. _"So then what does 'Elsa' mean?"_

Her voice was guardedly soft-spoken, but she answered with a childlike openness: _"Noble."_

The look on his face after she said that ignited the boyish foolishness in him. She almost retracted the statement with a self-conscious, _"Papa said_—_,"_ but he'd already begun scoffing.

The boy ducked a half-sigh, half-snort behind his wrist—disguising a moment of laughter—and faced her again with laughing eyes. _"If this is the foreshadowing of some romantic comedy, then I've gotta give kudos to the playwright."_

...She smiled, shaking her head and laughing with her shoulders instead of her mouth, before looking down at her gloves.

Only smiling, as it were, at the utter ridiculousness of his smile.

_(a tragic comedy for years to come)_

* * *

_"Sometimes it is okay to be an asteroid rather than a sun."_

_~** birdsonqs**_


	3. (III) The Message

**A/N:** The symbols **(*)** stand for canon information from Disney's official Frozen books.

* * *

_The stars always said good things about us._  
_I begged you to follow me back into their arms but_

_you were always too afraid of_  
_knowing yourself_  
_to listen._

_You're the writer now,_  
_so take a pen_  
_and make something happen._

**_~*by Peppermint-Pictures_**

* * *

༺.❆.༻

* * *

_―_**"Fear will be your enemy."**

❅ _(but you urged that life, reality, and one's existence, were entirely what you imagined them to be; that is the great prerogative of existentialists) _

_❄ ._

❆ .

_❄ ._

She remembered the first time she saw him fly.

_(like a reincarnated Icarus, you never learned how to soar, but you tried to flap)_

He'd slithered between the walls of the courtyard with a stolen pendant and dashed towards the open gates, his entire form transforming into a lightning streak across the field. Half of her heart had wanted to break through her teeth and scream for Kai, while the other half pumped with a sick anticipation to see this through to the very end.

_―"The past will be in the past, and I'm never going back."_

She balled up the hem of her dress with whitening knuckles, watching from her balcony like a domesticated owl watching a falcon.

_―"I'll test the limits and break through."_

Adrenaline, which had been sleeping in her system for years, stormed up with a thunderclap.

_―"I'll rise like the break of dawn."_

She stared at the boy with an overwhelmingly powerful desire to move her legs.

_―"and catapult off cloud nine."_

It angered her that he could do it now. Eugene could escape without being stopped or dragged down. The teenager had no prohibitions or priorities to chain him to the floor at all, none but the conditions of being illegitimate, orphaned, and impoverished, but if he ran fast enough ― if he shed his dead skin cells and traded them for feathers ― he could be as wing-footed as he liked.

_(but you had other handicaps that I didn't consider)_

Before he could touch the exit with outstretched fingertips _(you never should have flown this high)_, he was snatched off his heels by a guard, and her first instinct was to swallow the blood pulping her teeth. The consequence of biting her bottom lip had flayed the skin from the muscle, so she reclined to press a handkerchief against her mouth to dam the blood with a fizzing hiss.

_"You again, is it? The Fitzherbert of the halls."_

The scene below her feet ended with Kai's arrival. Refusing to bother the king with the hall boy's antics, Kai saw to his isolation with a flick of the wrist and a dismissal of the guards.

_(Daedalus said the point is to fly neither too low nor too high, but you made the mistake of aiming for the sun)_

The keys to Eugene's "penitentiary" were jingled and snatched as Kai strolled out of the hallway with a whistle behind him. The pauper was often escorted to solitary confinement for "acting up." Kai, when spoken to, called the isolation a form of juvy. The boy called it pitch black. Cold. Gloomy. A strange, alienating place with only a keyhole of sunlight to peek through.

She'd pass the door on her way to her own "correctional facility," turn an ear to hear him picking the knob with unconventional utensils, and felt her intestines turn out like a sleeve. His grunts echoed in the foreground of her mind, but it was really not so much of the boy that she was visualizing when she studied the door. She saw her spirit split from her body and approach it with a shaky hand, the very fingers hovering over the latch to the prison of another trapped person.

A screaming demon girl with black hair and goblin features.

_(that perfect girl is gone)_

The demon's chants were constantly spilling through the hinges of Eugene's door like a cobra's when she passed it:

**"Restriction ― restriction ― restriction. Standing frozen in the life you've chosen."**

She dreamt about the cackling face in her mind at night ― this distorted, hideous goblin pounding into the wood with fistfuls of wrath. Her shuddering soul begged to let her out―

_―"Be a good girl, darling,"_ her father's words resounded, grounding her conscience. _"Be a good girl for your father and mother._"

_(be the good girl you always have to be)_

She rolled over and faced the ineluctable fact that she could never contradict her father's rules and let that pitiably neglected child out.

_'Because you can never break character.'_

But the more she heard the deranged voice behind, **"that perfect girl is gone"** war with,_ "be the good girl you always have to be,"_ the more she felt her ice storm brew in her lungs. In her quest to pay service to a submissive but dispassionate regimen, she only increased billowing passions by ignoring the desires of the alter ego thundering inside of her.

_(conceal it; don't feel it)_

She wished on the stars behind the thunderclouds to not have needs ― to be metallic and ripple-less like the frozen lakes in the north. Whereas Anna overindulged in the liberties of a butterfly, she wormed into her _goody, dutiful, ol'-reliable-daughter_ shoes and put shackles on in the morning with her clothes.

_(all for my own catalytic good, though)_

_"Do you think those gloves will be enough? What if the magic shoots right through them?"_

―Her hands did not glacier a single windowsill since the gloves, but her mother still excelled in her role as the neurotic parent, constantly airing her own crippling doubts and fears while she hovered around her daughter like a hummingbird.

_"They'll help."_ ―Papa was her only anchor ― the overworked therapist with textbook solutions for parapsychological problems.

_(but this tunnel vision was turning out all wrong)_

For her, it was so incredibly easy to lose herself to the _formal, subservient_ character she presented when she believed her burdens expected such a character out of her.

_"But you'll be fine, Elsa,"_ Papa would say. _"You'll be fine as long as you conceal it."_

Everything would've been better if he simply told her that their lives would have rest if she was not only emotionless, but fearless. Level-headed and "all together," like him. That to measure every word with a teaspoon and fake normalcy with better efficiency would "benefit her" in all aspects of life. Unfortunately, he was _too loving_ to be honest.

_(too kind to say that I wasn't born to make choices)_

So for all her back-breaking, she didn't act out or tell her parents where their rules could go; she accepted her condition and smiled sheepishly as the shadow of the gates closed on her.

_(you can't break character, Papa said. you have to yield to your circumstances. live a life with nothing for yourself. bend your back and just hope it doesn't snap)_

And it was here where the thorns of resentment grew into barbs against her nervous, _goody-two-shoes_ heart.

_"Kai, that bastard boy has abandoned his station again."_

Thus to leave the library and see her boot-shining "illegitimate" trying to "break out" had slowly become a manifestation of her own conviction. The lad was conscienceless,_ (a lacking trait of mine that dragged me down),_ but his brain was constantly spinning with new ways to reconstruct life as he had it. He was not waiting ― sorrowfully, stoically waiting ― for the clouds to break open, thaw his ice cave, and show him the sun. His almond eyes were flashing with the rays, forever hot with a rebellious passion far from the gimlet of hopelessness.

_―"I've never been good at just standing still,"_ he'd brag.

Flapping off the ground of the courtyard to leave that spurned orphan in the dust was his only motivation because _nothingness_ was an occupation he couldn't live for.

_―"But I've got my own reasons for that, Princess."_

She recalled the time he said he saw what poor folks became after castles dispatched them.

_―"People step over their malnourished bodies in the streets."_

A bastard child was ignored by both_ cross and crown_ as is, which was almost worse than being poor.

_―"Why do you think Corona dumped me in Arendelle to become an indentured slave in the first place?"_

Even landowners withheld property from his kind to keep their own names taintless, so if he had that little rights available, he'd rather opt out of dying as a homeless man on some cold backstreet or castle floor.

_―"Kids like me don't even have family to know when or if we die."_

And that made him saddest. He didn't tell her, but she knew. She knew _him_.

_―"There isn't gonna be any place for me to belong, so I'm making my own, and that'll be that."_

She would watch his failed escapes religiously now. She would spectate the tragedy of someone else being confined for _not wanting to be restrained_ to the pitiful circumstances of their birth. She'd almost leave the balcony feeling exorcised through a transference of negative, pent-up energy, provoking him a little each time to run away ― to get into trouble ― to anger his supervisors ― to give them the finger.

_(turn away and slam the door)_

She projected onto him all her guiltiest, darkest feelings as he repeated this routine over and over, asserting the defiance she simply couldn't.

_(and never going back)_

The word _can't_ wasn't in his DNA. If it was, then he didn't understand the term or what it would be doing in his blood-work to begin with. He ran on some dreamer's will of,_ "I believe [that I can be free]._"

_(and remade into someone better)_

...She then wondered if he'd get along with _that girl_. The ambitious, headstrong goblin who wanted to be running, and feel the wind bring her back to life at the freedom of being that far away from home. He'd probably argue in opposition that he "didn't have a home," but as far as she was concerned, neither did she. Only a jailhouse. Not an orphanage or a servant hold, but a jailhouse all the same.

_(but that didn't stop you from rattling the bars of mine)_

_"So there's this story―"_

_"You're not supposed to be here!"_

_"Oh no...?"_ His smirks would always laugh for him. _"What's this? Are you saying we can't see each other anymore?"_

_(not until i parted my own clouds and freed the sun; till then, i'd rather not cloud yours)_

She gaped at him from where she stood like a sweaty, pigeon-toed victim on the scene of a burglary. With her shoulders hiked up to her neck and geometry book to her chin, her body was perpetually trembling from some frightful vision of her father lecturing down at her for allowing a servant boy to casually plant himself on the balcony of her tutor's study_._

_"You're not ― supposed ― to be here,"_ she rasped through her teeth, eyebrows practically furrowing up into her hairline. _"Go away!"_ She shooed him with her free hand the way a maid might shoo a bird.

_"Just hear me out!"_ His hands went up in defense, but his expression was still full of jest.

The expressions on her reddening, chubby face ― chubby enough to hold chocolate like squirrel nuts, he'd say ― went through a series of aerobics before she stamped her foot down and hissed: _"No!"_

_"Ah-ah-ah!"_ He wagged a finger. _"Behave, Princess! You'll have to take my word on this, because it's definitely something you'll want to hear,"_ he brokered, before digging into a worn satchel.

He always ended cliff-hangers like these with that suspenseful, _'there's something better than your worries,'_ tone, tickling that immature, childish part of her that she had to push back against.

_(but your sneaky fingers unfortunately knew where to tickle)_

Compared to herself, the undeterrable chap was a pretty little man-child of fourteen, though no less book-bound and eccentric. She, as a princess, had been flowering into a young lady of higher decorum ― or a freckled _Mother Hen_ as he called her, planted on the soil of her father's _"passive-aggressive oppression"_ like some sacred rose that couldn't grow past the fence. In Eugene's words, the need to utilize her own agency, which was a need he stereotyped everyone to have, would forever remain, _"stitched inside gloves"_ that caused her to, _"sacrifice her happiness for others like a tragic, misunderstood heroine."_ He'd then add cheekily, _"So it would do you some good to plant your own soil."_

_(and what I would've given to make you stop believing that I was one of your storybook characters)_

To her, his parody of her life was an abridged one. Although he never knew why her father shackled her magic to the cotton cuffs, he'd tell her he knew how her plot would end just by looking at her material. She would somehow _"save the world from a deadly foe with her super-powers,"_ and struggle with good vs. evil after a true love subplot. The "rock bottom" that she'll hit will pave way to her resolution, and _"the recovered, voiceless girl will become a championing 'voicetress' in her own right."_ Until then, the heroine will be stuck in the storyline of, _"attempting to avoid the darker recesses of her subconscious mind that threaten to undo her."_

_(and somehow you laughably broke down more than Papa)_

_"Now, I know it's here SOME-where~..."_ He dangled his leg from the balcony with his foot swinging back and forth. The pages of a sorceress novel were thumbed through until he came to a bookmarker. _"Ah-ha! ― Now listen to this."_ Eugene shimmied down into his "seat" to let her know that she should 'brace herself,' too. _"The Snow Queen,"_ he narrated dramaturgically. _"By Hans~ Christian Andersen."_

A groundswell of perplexity upsurged. The spoken text did stun her, and her ears were opening their canals to the size of saucers, but she already knew the famous title. According to her father, the goddess of the story was so allegedly heartless, so freezingly cold and inhuman, that she retched at the thought of sharing any parallelism.

_"I'm not like her,"_ she said with blind rebuke, seeing nothing but her distaste for the unstated correlation that her hall boy was making between herself and this Mephistopheles. _"Now please,"_ the girl whispered as she dissolved into a vulnerable voice, making a "scoot" gesture with her hand, _"Just go away!"_

He glanced minutely at her with a bright, sure, easy face that was quite unaccusatory, but he was as selfishly engrossed in his discovery as a fanboy finding science fiction. _"Maybe not, but there could be a connection."_

Her expression went flat.

He felt her glare almost electrocute the hairs on his arms. _"What I mean is ― someone's reimagined you before."_

_"She's not real,"_ she upbraided.

_"But you are,"_ he leveled with emollience.

The pause that spaced their words apart was more ambivalent than comforting, because Eugene still looked at her like she was a god. On one hand, his rationale was too strong to not occasionally bumble over her entire phenomenon; on the other, the part in him that was still a child was constantly researching her origins via _storybook_ and _Norse mythology_, which he felt emboldened to share with her with the seriousness of a detective.

He turned to her now and said intelligently, _"It's Mr. Anderson you should put your magnifying glass on ― not the Snow Queen."_

The pause this time almost felt staged by him for dramatic effect, but he didn't give her a moment to wring the nerves out of her fingers. The door to the study had been pushed open too soon, and he'd flown from the balcony like a professionally rehearsed Zorro actor. When her tutor entered the room, she tripped around and ironed her dress with her hands to greet him―

_"Fitzherbert! What in the devil―?!"_

Elsa winced at the yell outside, and opened one eye to look up at her tutor.

The man's face was redder than a baboon's bottom._ "...Was that―..._**_boy_**_ rummaging through my book shelves, Your Highness?"_

Her fingers wormed in their clasp. She steeled her face and went on to explain that she had only been in the room for a little more than three minutes, and would therefore have no knowledge of a larcenist infiltrating his property.

_"Strange, then..."_ He stroked his beard. _"If it is not him, then I could swear that a hall boy has been robbing me of my sagas, and the Fitz is the only hall boy who reads. Fitz-orphans are usually no good, you know..."_

She nodded. She pressed her gloved nails into the curves of her palms, but she nodded. This was a scarce, hair-splitting dodge of the scythe for her, but Eugene, who was the culprit of her rotten break, did not escape castigation so easily. Whether she was an eyewitness of the episode or not, she was certain that he'd been caught by none other than Kai in the gardens.

_"Well,"_ her tutor hesitated, _"we'll come to it in the morning, but keep your eyes open for any reaching hands."_

She nodded smilingly, before chewing on the head of her pencil when he resigned to chalking the board. A flashback of the moment before drifted back to her in a pearly white vignette:

_―"The Snow Queen, by Hans~ Christian Andersen."_

_―"She's not real."_

_―"But you are."_

_―"It's Mr. Anderson you should put your magnifying glass on ― not the Snow Queen."_

...She shook her head and tried not to think of it again.

He was book-bound and eccentric, and clues or directions about her life could not be found in fairy-tales. She only idolized the _"once upon a time's"_ her parents read to her as a foundling. Of course, she never adored the unrealistic romances back then, but the adventure novels, specifically the tale of _the brave queen_ who slewed dragons **(*)** and saved her kingdom. _Her Majesty_ was as much of Elsa's self-insert as _Flynnigan Rider_ was for Eugene, but she realized too late that she had nothing in common with her ― was not a brave heiress who could slay dragons, let alone even her own, according to the prophecy of the trolls. Reality thwarted her possibilities of ever becoming that woman.

Yet Eugene was not the man Flynnigan Rider was, either, and clung to him for that exact purpose.

...She frowned at the worksheet in front of her, only perking up to adjust her posture when she heard her tutor:

_"Teaching quadratic formulas are often like teaching gymnastics to children,"_ he droned._ "But I trust that you'll reach the end of this labyrinth after one walkthrough, Your Highness. Had you not been born a princess, I daresay you would've been a mathematical architect."_

She nodded in acceptance of his challenge, big-eyed and beaming. She may have fancied the brave queen from her childhood ― but she loved geometry **(*)** far more for separate reasons. The numbers were better _(safer)_ than the words, silver-linings, and symbolisms found on the wafer-thin pages of storybooks. Her tutor proved that math provided the safety net of being certain, and she knew that each time she solved an equation, the sum would never be uncertain. This was the gulf between she and the symbol-lover: he inhaled storybooks to find guidance; she binged on geometry books to solve problems.

_―"M'lady, imagination has no circumference,"_ Eugene would still ape, gracefully yanking the rug from under her. _"Because I can reimagine myself as anything."_

He'd argue that words were better than numbers because they gave the arms and legs to make one's personal vision manifest. They could not only redefine meanings, character traits, fates, and storylines, ― they allowed a person to use their own mind to create a world through independent thought.

_―"Like you're chasing after something,"_ he'd say about reading. _"Like if you just keep going, there'll be something even better."_

A well-timed punctuation mark could keep the _ever-after's_ in place, because the end of a book always secured the safety net of never being uncertain. Like math, there was no, _"What now?"_ to think about after _The End_.

_―"...But after the story's over, it's over."_ And according to his eyes, he'd feel even worse than before he had dug his papercut thumbs into a book, because he wanted that certainty back ― all day, every day.

She curled her bottom lip under her teeth, slowing her pencil...

_'Is there any gulf at all?'_

After uncountable hours spent in confinement, the storyteller was let out without dinner that evening. With _gulfs_ and _numbers_ and _words_ and _safety-nets_ on her mind, she took a food platter and saw to him at the bottom of a stairwell in the dankest corner of the castle. He was tearing off a piece of stolen bread with his teeth as he glared flatly at the wall, alone and friendless. At first glance, his frail and unprotected body looked sickeningly thin, demanding that he needed nutrients bread couldn't give. His thin figure suddenly folded its arms and shivered from the chill of the cold winter weather.

She wished that she could donate better clothing to replace his browning shirt and short sleeves, but those decisions were reinforced by the _Crown_. How could her father make those calls for servants who never even crossed his line of sight, however?

_(but you never asked for warmth and you never wanted pity)_

Eugene paused to blink at the girl holding a tray of food from the top stair of the cellar he'd chosen to hide in. Her eyes looked detached, like a fish's, wet and gleaming in their underbellies with red veins, but she wouldn't say a word. She simply placed the tray down in front of him, nudged it once with a scrape against the floor, and stood up to leave.

_"Thank you."_

Her foot paused on the first step.

_"...Really,"_ he blubbered, weak from captivity.

She pinched her fingertips, half-turning to brush a lock of hair behind her ear, and faced him with a sheepish smile. He blinked languidly before looking away to scrub his face with his arm, hoping to scrub off his vulnerable expression.

_(you didn't know there was nothing wrong with sympathy)_

A quiet goodnight was bidded by her. A mumbled goodnight was bidded by him, and she returned to her quarters. The next day ended with the same predicament, but this time, his response was uncharacteristically somber:

_"How do you picture yourself?"_

Her shaking foot paused on the second step.

Was this another one of his head games?

Was he planning to bite at her "overprivileged" status?

Head pounding with delirium, she turned and looked over her shoulder. A longer pause would've been seen as impolite, so she granted him the whole of her attention and practiced smiling even though her eyebrows were frowning. _"I'm sorry,"_―a shake of the head; a squint of the eyes―_"but I don't understand._"

Without looking at her, he crammed a grape into his mouth with the heel of his thumb. His eyes were more removed than she initially knew, but the beds were sunken down by gray circles, so this was the fever of malnutrition speaking: _"As in, how do you imagine yourself when you're older?"_

As her father told her.

_(will-less)_

_"...What would you want to be?"_ she redirected, accidentally abandoning all decorum after hearing her own impulsive, hateable thoughts.

_"Fearless,_" he replied, having picked up on her mumble.

The phrase did not necessarily floor her, because their different plays on the word did not include blizzards and frozen family members at the absence of it. However, she'd long understood the parallel feeling behind it. Though he said his piece with a proud boast, she could see in his face that he wanted to burn his umbilical cord to any of the dark, insecure mentalities spawned by his childhood, and through such obliteration of struggle and trauma, rise from the ashes as an invincible, untouchable phoenix no one could break, sadden, minimize, or pity. They wouldn't have the power to do it; life and identity would be in his hands. Perhaps this was not a supernatural ointment, but...an emotional one.

The boy suddenly made a silly smile ― as if smiling kept her from reading between these clear lines ― and turned to his tray.

She didn't quite understand his blindness to what he was; he already appeared quite fearless, strong, and invincible. From what she understood, he was driven to break away because everything around him kept telling him that he couldn't, and that was braver than she could be_._

_(but was the 'carefree, unbeholden individualist' actually carefree or was i looking at an illusionist?)_

_"Thanks...―again,_" he repeated, seemingly embarrassed by his own position._ "For...giving me something to eat."_

_"...You're welcome."_

But the question, _"How do you picture yourself?"_ simmered like a flame lit to a piece of paper.

She disappeared to her room, feeling the spraying artery that he cut open. She knew he made a hobby out of telling the younger, baby orphans in the servant halls to be all that they might wildly picture themselves to be, but she found it over-idealistic. His motto for them was, _"this is the good part about being a person and not a dog or a cat nature makes for one type of life: you get to find a new dream."_

The more likable side of his go-getter-ness nudged those boys to think that they needn't accept the broken childhood into which they were born. A human given right, by his opinion, included living according to their own vision, being independent, and deciding to choose their fate no matter what God had set up for them. That fanciful existentialism made his "little brothers" feel like their fantasies were capable of coming true with the tools of _"find a new dream and change the scenery!"_ confidence alone, a fancifulness she never chewed her own lip over until now.

_―"...What would you want to be?"_

She scribbled her answer to herself on paper in her bedroom, trying to draw the dimensions of human anatomy with geometric shapes, only to stop when she realized she didn't know how to fill in the details with free-form lines. Applying technicality to the art only seemed to mock her lack of agency, and that upset her. Her brain had pictured a_ head-and-shoulders-above-the-mountains_ woman, sashaying and bellowing over the sunrise with clenched, triumphant fists.

_'...Fearless.'_

―With that goddess's lion-hearted, indomitable essence foaming from her pores. The need to be acquainted with her ran so deep that she thought it might end her, but her hands couldn't give her arms and legs. She couldn't even begin the soul of her eyes or the personality of her mouth.

Would it be smiling or smirking?

Snarling or sneering?

The sketcher turned to her mirror for inspiration, but she didn't like the face behind the glass. She didn't like what the eyes glimmered with, the lips which were twisted into a grimace, and it was impossible to stop seeing those horrid deformities. Impossible to stop seeing the frozen fractals of an abominable, black-haired girl, with corrupted needs and ugly features, thrashing, raving, and desperate to escape or just die.

_(i didn't have a face)_

_'But you can not break character._'

_(...which one?)_

The following weeks welcomed more starved evenings for Eugene, but now, she did not descend. There was no living through him anymore; he'd fallen into a lifeless, isolated schedule that matched her own. When his arms grew too bony and feeble to scrub hallway floors, she all but dropped a tray in front of him.

_"You shouldn't keep trying to run away."_

The food that was supposed to be entering his mouth slopped into his lap when he paused. He slowly rotated his head and showed her the expression of someone who'd just missed a joke. _"Come again?"_

Her opening line had not been harsh; her tiny feet could not yet fill the shoes of a tyrant. She simply gave him a tired, drawn face, surely not one as marred and gracile as his, but one that aimed to release and project misplaced hopelessness. _"Kai will put you back in solitary confinement tomorrow."_

Silence.

Then, a witty catchphrase: _"Let 'em try."_ He closed his eyes indignantly and snorted his food, chewing with enthusiasm. _"I'll be the best hurricane they've ever seen. Doors and gates won't stop me."_

His surety was completely out of touch with reality. His eyes wore pockets of broken blood vessels, his faded shirt sank with the concavity of his chest, and his wrists were mottled with fingerprints where strong hands had manhandled him.

_(a man made out of stardust and hurricane-weather could've slipped through cracks and flown out with the breeze, but you're still breaking nails and skin trying to scratch the doors)_

Ire exploded in her ears like a blood-clot, and while it was an unsettling thing to feel, she felt her eardrums beat with it. _"Why can't you accept it?"_

The brown ran out of Eugene's face faster than air from a punctured bag. She had planned a lecture, but wasn't quite sure what to think of the fact that she had allowed herself to become so thoroughly tainted by her own feelings. The silence in the present moment was more vicious than silence itself, and her diaphragm closed shut on her.

_(i could feel the wax melting from your wings)_

The exposure to this side of him made her feel as though she had just crushed the skull of a flapping bird with her shiny, bronze boot, and she immediately felt sick for having turned his spirit into powder.

_(i defeathered you)_

She watched the carefree teenager turn rigid. Quiet the way a foe is sometimes quiet. She made a few small sounds of an apologetic nature, but not a single croak made it past her lips.

Then, without word, he leaned forward on both knees and elbows, arranged his folded hands in front of him, and stared up into her eyes with determinedly hard, searching ones of his own. _"Princess...I _**_refuse_**_ to accept _**_this_**_."_

_(...and i always rejected the fact that that was why i liked you so much, Eugene...)_

Like a brittle corpse, she dropped her gaze and shook her head with a bobbing mouth, palming her nose with the heel of it before calming the frenzy in her hands. _"That wasn't...I didn't meant to say―..."_ The atmosphere bled, and the silence sharpened into a knife. _"...I didn't mean them..."_ whispered she, half-fainted from what felt like her own blood loss.

_(i didn't mean to pierce your skin with more mean words)_

With a shake of the head, he smiled through what looked like heartache, which widened the laugh lines around his mouth from ear to ear, before regressing his face into a frown. _"I didn't 'endure' all this and come all this way for words like 'just accept it.' I've got a different set of vowels than you do." _But his expression burned with an unsaid lecture: **_"At least I flew; when did you?"_**

Her oxygen thinned, yet she stood inert, slaving away to the emotions operating under the threshold of her subconsciousness.

_"Are _**_you_**_ comfortable curled up at the back of your sob-story, or do you want to get up?"_

...The space between her eyebrows closed, and with a twitch of pain, the nerves laced in her forehead began to jitter.

This breed of silence was bone-crushing ― inevitably giving her enough time to wonder when and how their roles got switched. She was not herself within these minutes, and he sensed that. She was neither herself ― which he knew to be the quiet, serene child he'd petted in the library ― nor the withdrawn adolescent named Princess Elsa. She was a nameless entity drifting along the clouds of some netherworld ― a walking mist of white unable to take her own form. Through this one stare, the porcelain doll had shown him the bottom of her icicle ribs.

Now his face was all apology and weak bones and dirt smeared on his cheeks, like he wanted to hand her a knife and tell her to twist it in his gut. _"Prin―"_

_"Where would you run...?"_

There was a moment of crickets.

_"...Beg your pardon?"_

She silently slid over to the end of the bottom step, sat down after folding her dress under her legs, and closed her thighs against her hands as a tear dropped off her throat. Strangely and blankly she ran her gaze all over him, with the eyes of a child submerged in sleep, lost at sea, rolling over the tides of her dormant mind, if she dare sail it. _"...Where...would you _**_run_**_...?"_

The muscles in his face softened for her. She supposed that he wanted to sit a hot hand on her cold fingers, babble an apology, laugh nervously about a joke to take the devastation away, negotiate a bargain for something to make it up, promise to scrub her bedroom floors twice a morning, but he supposed those actions couldn't bandaid the artery he cut open.

He went on watching her, eyes flying up and down her face, before looking away and thumbing his nose to keep it from growing wet. _"Ahh...let's see...where ― would I ― _**_run_**_...?"_ He drummed his fingers against his knee with dimples pocking his chin as he imitated a serious brooder.

Although another tear fell from her eyelash, she continued to sit like a mannequin in a public display window.

_"Is...'anywhere' a certifiable answer?"_ he laughed self-consciously, rubbing across his eyelids with an index finger to peek up at her.

Something was ghosting in and out of her eyes like sea creatures underwater, but she looked down before she could have him know it, and churned her fingers like a person who was suffering from claustrophobia, _"...Where's 'anywhere'?_"

_"...I guess ― well ― you know, _**_anywhere_**_..."_ Becoming more self-conscious and uncertain than before, he dropped the back of his head against the wall behind him, eyes chasing his feelings. _"_**_Any_**_ 'anywhere'..."_ When something seemingly funny graced his mind, he closed those eyes and bit his lip with a relaxed, soporific expression, coming to terms with his heart after two skipped beats, and released his lip to murmur: _"Anywhere but nowhere."_

_(you were a child of Neptune ― an in-between dream state of oblivion reaching for infinity)_

She blinked at his mouth, frowning, and looked back up at his eyelids.

He opened one at her, giving a mock face of solemnity, before curling his lips into a smile. _"So I can be, 'tanned, rested, and alone.'"_

...She made a half-sigh, half-snort to substitute a laugh, tucking hair behind her ear. Elsa nooked her swollen nose as another tear splattered on her lap like a fallen star. _"You're incorrigible."_

_(i was Pluto ― the blue-gray child furthest from the sun)_

His shoulders laughed up and down, pitifully at best, while a warmer smile seesawed up on his face.

She forced a smile back, and then looked down.

_(...and i liked you more than i shoul__d've__)_

_"Say..."_ A cup of water clattered against the tray as he set it down and faced her with his entire body. He proceeded to cross his legs and hold onto the toes of his shoes, craning his face into hers to whisper behind the back of his hand,_ "Wanna stage a 'scandalous' skedaddle?"_

...Her face closed like a drawbridge against him.

_"Now, hold on ― let me ease your conscience―"_

_―"A 'scandalous skedaddle'?"_ she repeated, more critical of the grammar than its impossible-to-understand meaning.

_"Exactly right, Princess, but ― hang on, hang on, now don't make that face ― just allow me to ask one~ tiny question before you shoot me down."_

The princess continued to wait with her lips puckered into an involuntary pout.

He added, _"And then you'll never have to listen to me blabber again for the next twenty years of your life."_

An eyebrow shot up.

He cocked his head, eyes big and bright, and wagged both of his.

Her pursed lips fought a smile.

_(...sometimes i wished i hadn't liked you)_

_"...Do you have any tangible desires, Princess?"_ He watched her with one probing eye as a smirk spread across his cheeks.

Elsa flinched, immediately showing him an expression of embarrassment and offense. Her legs crushed against the hands wedged between her knees as she opened her mouth to protest―

_"Wha―HO! _**_No_**_. No, no, no!"_ He patted the air like he was trying to calm a horse. _"...Not, uh..."_ Eugene coughed into his fist. _"Not like _**_desires_**_, but general―...general ASPIRATIONS."_

The princess remained still. For a moment, the pauper probably wondered if she'd even heard him at all, as she had not blinked or moved, but this was possibly the longest conversation she'd ever had with him. _"What do you mean by aspirations...?"_

_"You _**_know. _**_Dreams, HOPES, wish-lists. __Your absolute greatest ― and I mean GREATEST ― longings in the whole wide star-system."_

_"And why would I want to tell you that?"_

_"Because whatever you say, nothing will change, so someone might as well know, right?"_

She turned away to shut her eyes and hide her expression from him, exhaling rather impatiently, "_I don't know―"_

_"C'man, 'COURSE you do."_

The princess sighed and shook her head at the ground, smiling pitifully at her gloved hands. _"It doesn't matter."_ She covered one with the other. _"Papa―"_

_"Eh, right. The ― uh ― _**_overprotective_**_ father who tells you your entire destiny is down-sized to being coached on a crown ― but what do you do after an entire afternoon seminar on politics? Return to your room and then what? What comes next?"_ He followed the movement of her head when she broke eye contact to look forward.

_'...I look out the window.'_ Her cheek twitched. The eyelashes began fluttering again. The sogginess started coming back. When she looked down, he needed nothing more than that.

_"That's what I thought,"_ he concluded under his breath.

She hugged her knees tighter. Why did she allow herself to sound so upset about those circumstances, like she wished she could be someone else tonight by being where she wasn't supposed to be? They both came here to forget and face something, but the girl's drawbridge had dropped open ― accidentally, maybe, yet enough for him to crawl in.

_"You help me get out of here, and I help you get what you want,"_ he baited. His eyes all but suffused the following word in sunlight: _"Freedom."_

...The restrained look on her face after he said that motivated him to shovel even deeper.

_"Let's put our heads together,"_ he bribed with an extra creamy voice. _"You're smart. You have access to doors I can't open. You can smile real pretty and get the keys from guards I can't. We can take a long boat ― get as far away from the gates as possible ― make a beeline for Yggdrasil, and vamoose! We've flown the coop. After we reach the mountains, we'll shake hands and go our separate ways."_

The princess kept glaring at him, but he saw something growing on her eye ― a twinkling light, a ripple of water rising from the pupil.

He drew himself into her, voice alive and sudden, requesting that she be his dovetail: _"Don't think about the math we can't get around, think of this like reading a story: this is you closing your eyes and feeling the sensation of something greater than the walls in your life."_

Tears were blinked out of her eyes. Scared tears. Desperate tears. Imagination now obliterated of its circumference, his dialect and clever imagery brought a picture of what-if's into still-frame. It provided the arms and legs to make her personal vision manifest, permitting her to imagine a world of independent will―

_"Nothing will happen except what you want to happen, Princess."_

―and it was terrible to watch him, with his sunrise eyes, and sky-fevered face, as his silver tongue made her chords vibrate to terrifying pulses. Her body was frightened by what her heart felt.

_"We'll both be stepping on soil we want."_ He ticked his head with grinning teeth. _"You won't have to worry about anyone making you feel bad, weak, or as low as the dirt. No gloves, no doors...no right, no wrong, no rules, no appellations, compromises, gates, or criticizers...just free."_

...What was this meteorite in her stomach?

_"So what's your choice?"_

She sat motionless, lips parted and eyes racing across his.

_("What's your _**_choice_**_?")_

All of the feelings laming her body ― all of the captivity followed by half a dynasty of watching birds through windows ― screamed for those liberties, and Eugene provided a longboat to open, free waters. He knew that her real self, raw, reformed, deprived of the gates and stuffy wardrobes, and dancing to the music of her own heartbeat, begged to be uncensored, just this once.

_"We'll part ways as unlikely friends. Sound edible enough for you?"_

Having said that, the better sense in her which would never simply "go away," became aware of the fact that he was trying to sway, tear, and undress the obligations her father clothed her in with his uncanny ability to exploit her brain. He read her out loud, telling her that he could see what she wanted ― how rebelling against the rectitude of her parents was a healthy part of growing up ― that something was a form of rejection ― and all these other psychological breakdowns. His face was lit up with stupid effect, and all at once, she hated it.

_(why were you trying to con an impressionable child?)_

_"Be honest ― about everything, everything you're thinking and feeling at the same time."_

And so she was: _"I have a responsibility; you don't."_

He flinched at her compliant, matter-of-factly statement, and the stupid sunrise in his eyes finally set.

_(i wasn't born to make choices)_

Though she was more than aware that her phrase was merely coming from the mouth of someone holding a twisted arm. Her reaction was a recital of her father's points ― lines she rehearsed in the mirror with muscle-memory until they became the marrow that supported her bones ― and she could hear the sound of her heartbeats clashing with her own vocal chords. Unfortunately, Eugene's antennas could, too.

_"I wasn't asking the king."_ He examined the girl in front of him with frantic pupils that wouldn't stay in one spot, determined to see this ploy through to the very end. _"And I'm not asking Princess Elsa; I'm asking _**_Elsa_**_."_

_"Her answer would be the same as theirs,"_ she persisted. Her voice was rocky with confusion, angry at him for undoing every lock on the privy chambers in her mind, and angry at herself for knowing his idea of her was accurate._ "_

_What would you rather be?"_ he milked. _"A supernova, or a dying star?"_

...Cripes did he know how to work it.

_(the point is to fly neither too low or too high, but to follow the path of flight)_

The glow of accomplishment was almost shining off his greasy face, but there was something a little more to his assiduity. He smiled with the thrusting of his hand, pausing for her to take it and give his dirty palm a shake. She stared at the lines on it. _"What'd you say, Princess? Partners?"_

She didn't say anything; the blank wall of her face didn't move; the cracked ice in her eyes didn't melt. He turned his palm over, opening it, waiting for her hand to meet his. It never did.

_"...Princess?"_

She glanced at her shoulder with melancholy, deciding that he was harmless, titillative, and foolish, and could not be reviled when she'd seen him as a decoy herself, but there was no partnership to be had between them. Her fear of making wrong decisions and failing her family was larger than any resentment or ambition to be freed from it.

_"...Elsa?"_ He withered now.

Her reply came low, soft, and final: _"Goodnight, Eugene."_

The effect worked: he deflated. The princess could see by the clockwork of his face that he was trying to think, but there was not a single loose screw in her psyche for him to put a crowbar under and jimmy out. She stood with the somberness of her decision, dusted her blue dress, and picked up his tray.

...Eugene looked away and massaged the rim of his ear, smiling and blinking like a blind, emotional child who'd just been left out in the rain again, while the bruises under his eyes seemed even grodier than before.

She dabbed the sweat on her forehead with the side of her wrist to disguise any sympathetic unrest, most of which she despised herself for having at all.

For all his tricks and gambits, there was no doubting that he had the power _(or was it a lack of self-esteem?)_ to think he had nothing to lose by being as extraordinary a character as he could be, _because he didn't_. Nothing beside him to look at him real soft, nothing beside him to hug him and tell him he was fine the way he was, he was accepted, and didn't have to run away to get something. What he did have had been taken from him a long time ago, but she still had roots here.

She shivered once, though came no closer to his sunken shoulders. When his eyes leveled with hers, they were so horrifically vague that she had to look away. There had been no ambition in them, no light of battle, no jest, no foolish aspirations ― just a defeated boy on the blink of surrender.

But he quickly turned and wiped his sleepless, baggy eyes, taking no less than ten seconds to sleeve back into his old skin and sigh theatrically, _"Welp, I had a feeling you'd be like this. There's no removing the statue of Aphrodite from her obelisk without ten men, after all."_ The easy, gay shrug of his shoulders seemed to say that nothing weighed on his heart except this light jest, that she should react with offense or dismiss him without looking deeper, but she knew all too well that his emotions had taken him seawards.

All that remained to do now was to close her mouth, forbid return, and leave him to grope the floors for what scraps of dignity he had left.

_(you are not made out of stardust)_

She walked down the hallway to her room, passing through clearings bright with sunlight and dark with shadow. After a while, the lines began forming themselves into a perfectly girded pattern of bars on her face.

_(This is why you're not a bird)_

Tears burned the whites of her eyes as she marched faster.

_(This is why you're just a boy)_

She locked her bedroom door and chained the gap with erratic hands, sinking down the paint like a unicorn who'd just been shot in the back.

_(but...)_

_― "Are you comfortable curled up at the back of your sob-story, or do you want to get up?"_

She broke down between her knees like a mountain crumbling on the shoulders of her own virtues.

_―"What's your **choice**?"_

The reflection in the mirror that always waited stared back at her. Thrashing, raving, desperate to escape or just kill her.

_―_**"Frozen in the life you've chosen."**

Though a little ways to the right, lied a sketch of empty circles and lines. Incomplete. Stillborn. Unable to take organic form.

_―"...How do you picture yourself...?"_

She smeared snot and tears across her mouth, and breathed.

_―"As in, how do you imagine yourself when you're older?"_

The girl wobbled forward, picked up the old sketch, and looked for a face among the eraser marks.

_―"...What would **you** want to be?"_

She placed it on the floor and bent over it, raising a shaky hand armed with her pencil.

_―"M'lady, imagination has no circumference. I can reimagine myself as anything_._"_

Tears splotched the paper. The pencil dragged through them.

_―"...if you just keep going, there'll be something even better."_

Her hand lifted.

_―"How do you―"_

**―"Fear will be your enemy."**

_"―picture yourself?"_

She pressed her tongue to the corner of her mouth, and held up her work. _'...Fearless.'_ With hair like the feathers of a phoenix, dress crystallized by a constellation of stars, and eyes burning like a breaking dawn.

_(this is how I picture myself)_

_'My invincible me.'_

_(this is who i reimagine myself to be)_

A tear slipped past her smile.

_(...my new dream)_

She wrapped her arms around the woman and hugged her to her heart.

_―"Don't think about the math we can't get around, think of this like reading a story: this is you closing your eyes and feeling the sensation of something greater than the walls in your life."_

_❄ ._

. ❆

_❄ . (i'd forgotten that Pluto was the planet of rebirth and transformation)_

* * *

**༺********{********.✸.********}********༻**

* * *

_Promise me that you'll never be __a number,_  
_or a majority;_  
_to always make your heart beat in a way_  
_that makes you know you're alive,_  
_and here,_  
_and special,_**  
**

_and worth it..._

**~*by Peppermint-Pictures**

* * *

❄** Author's Note **✸

* * *

The thing about _"life is what one imagines itself to be"_ is canonically true for Elsa. Jennifer Lee likes to say her powers were uncontrollable because she feared them. I imagine this means that her powers are connected to her vision of herself, that what she thinks is what they become, so be that a curse or a gift, it manifests as she sees it, hence quotes like, _"one thought crystallizes an icy blast" _and_ "fear will be your enemy." _

It's a nice indicator that her control was dictated by self-image (thought pattern), not the notion of "controlling" emotions and outbursts _[a misconception in a part of the Frozen fanbase, which was actually just Elsa's and her father's misinterpretation]_, so I wanted to play with what Eugene's arc in Tangled stands for as a counterbalance, as well as a storyline Elsa eventually decides to bandwagon when she hits those mountains, too.


End file.
